Mutchkin

A Scots liquid measure of four Scottish gills, in use from at least 1661 until the late nineteenth century.

The mutchkin is the rung that makes sense of the Scots liquid ladder. Four Scottish gills of about 106ml make one mutchkin of roughly 424ml; two mutchkins make a chopin; four make the Scots pint of some 1,696ml.

That last figure is the one worth sitting with. An imperial pint is 568ml, so three of them come to 1,705ml — which means a Scots pint was very nearly three imperial pints, and anyone trading across the border in pints was dealing in quantities that differed by a factor of three while sharing a name. The scope for honest confusion, and for the other kind, was considerable.

The measure is recorded from at least 1661 and may go back to the fifteenth century. It survived the Union of 1707 by a long way, remaining in use into the late nineteenth century, which is a reminder that a measure lives in the hands that use it rather than in the statute that abolishes it.